Home and family

Rate of teen fatherhood, not motherhood, rose in U.S.

While the US birth rate hasn’t changed for teenage girls in the last two generations, researchers have found that teenage parenthood has changed over time.

The researchers analyzed parenthood, education, and income statistics over a long time span from two groups of about 10,000 people—those born in 1962-64 and those born in 1980-82. These are the key findings:

Teen fathers and mothers came increasingly from single-mother families with disadvantaged backgrounds.

The proportion of teen mothers or fathers living with their partners didn’t change, but far fewer were married.

The birth rates to teenage girls across the two groups didn’t change, but the reported rate of teenage fatherhood increased, a seemingly contradictory conclusion. For example, 1.7 percent of the men in the older group were fathers by the time they were 17, while in the younger group, nearly double that number were dads. About 8 percent of the 17-year-old females in both groups were mothers.

The researchers offer several theories for the reported growth in the number of teenage fathers.

“In what might be called the ‘cougar effect,’ we may be seeing more young males partnering with older females,” says researcher Maureen Pirog of Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs. In the media, television shows such as Cougar Town and Extreme Cougar Wives and dating websites like CougarLife.com have popularized this phenomenon.

Pirog says that other factors could explain the reported increase in teenage paternity. State child support enforcement offices are aggressively working to establish paternity, made easier by the simplicity and lower cost of genetic paternity tests and the now-commonplace practice of establishing paternity in the hospital.

It is also possible that teenage girls are selecting male partners who are closer to their own age. Reporting for teenage males may have improved because the stigma associated with non-marital parenting decreased between the two generations.

Whatever the reason, it is a worrisome trend because teen fathers are less likely than older men to provide financial support and a stable home environment to their children.

But there are encouraging data points in the findings, the researchers say. Teen parents are staying in school longer, and there has been an uptick in their income level.

“What hasn’t changed over time is the need for well-funded Head Start programs and pre-K programs so that teen mothers can continue their work or study,” Pirog says. “High schools need to foster programs targeted at those at the greatest risk of unintended pregnancy and unprepared parenting.”